I was an Apple rep at my school from 2001-2002, and was lucky enough to buy a first generation iPod in Dec '01 for half price ($200). Physical scroll wheel, 5GB, no color, firewire only, and dock-less. It's been almost 4 years now and it still works pretty well. I say pretty well because the battery has always been a little shady, though you can still use it for a good 5+ hour period straight, filly charged.
It was about a year later that I started to really distance myself from my previous love of Apple and it's products. If you look at their history since late 2001, the only really great innovation was the iPod. Since then, they've just thrown more and more stuff onto the existing model, in hopes of making it better (and I know that some of the models since then have a pretty good track record of not being faulty). The reason I distanced myself was because they don't seem to be making logical, ethical decisions in their business model(s). It's rush-rush-rush to get the new one out, watch as it's deemed faulty, and then offer some *really* unfair kickback to consumers (I got $25 for my battery in the recent class-action lawsuit). What used to cripple Apple - the extremely long waits for just-announced products - has shifted violently to the other end of the spectrum, and again, the consumers suffer.
The Apple-Microsoft debate is pretty moot now, as each company is becoming more and more known as non-OS companies. But for all the flack MS has taken in the past for shady business, Apple now seems to be doing the same (different shadiness, but shadiness nonetheless). For a while now, visits to ***forum and other sites - even non-tech ones - keep popping up headlines about Apple and their plans to rectify some new problem they created. When are consumers going to stop treating Apple to this phantom exemption?
